Abstract
This course is an exploration about placemaking in the Mediterranean: where people settled, how they settled, and how they manifested their beliefs and social structures in physical form. We will cover an enormous span of time and space in this class. We will begin with early Neolithic societies in the Near East, Egypt, and Greece and work through the Roman Empire. In the process urbanism established itself as the very definition of western civilization. We will explore this phenomenon from the viewpoint of the city’s physical appearance, architecture, and design in order to understand how the “look” of a city influences the way those who live in it act, think, and what they believe. We will find ourselves at the crossroads of several disciplines: sociology, psychology, political science, economics, geography, history, art, and archaeology. Those are a lot of specialized fields, and one could study the city for a long time from the perspective of any single one of them alone. We will explore constructed space – the domestic, political, and sacred buildings – as well as unconstructed space, and the boundaries which encircled it. We will examine the data for which we can understand cities: retrieved from archaeological excavation and survey, ancient texts, and even modern comparanda. This is a class about time, space, and people. You will become better attuned to understanding your landscape: how it shapes you, and how you shape it.